For The New Yorker, Puffin Foundation fellow E. Tammy Kim profiles Lori Chavez-DeRemer, Trump’s nominmee for Labor Secretary. Kim provides an overview of Chavez-DeRemer’s past pro-union policy record, including her support for the PRO-Act when she was in Congress, and places her within the context of a small-but-growing group of Republican politicians who claim they are pro-labor, including JD Vance and Josh Hawley.
As Kim points out, the Republican Party’s rebrand as the “working class party” comes as some leaders in the labor movement, including Teamsters President Sean O’Brien, attempt to break out from their place within the broader progressive coalition. However, Chavez-DeRemer’s pro-labor bonafides and the MAGA movement’s pro-worker rhetoric are hard to square with Elon Musk’s role in the new administration, as well as President Trump’s recent attacks on important labor institutions. Kim writes:
Whatever a Republican pro-labor platform might be, it surely doesn’t include what Trump has done since last month. He fired a member of the National Labor Relations Board, an independent agency that’s now deprived of quorum and cannot rule on disputes between unionized workers and employers. He did the same thing at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, another independent agency that enforces workplace statutes. He also cut off billions in energy and infrastructure spending—and the jobs, many in red states, that go along with it—in an attempt to unwind Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act and to achieve his goal of “Terminating the Green New Deal.”